THE ZooLocist—Juty, 1872. 3127 
one passage from the ‘ Discussion,’ in which this subject is intro- 
duced by Mr. Lewis, and see what he says of this most accomplished 
of lepidopterists, living or dead,—of this most modest and retiring 
of men. If Mr. Lewis has published here or elsewhere any modified 
or qualified remarks on my friend and his ‘Synonymic Lists,’ 
I shall be most willing to reprint them; but I cannot take upon 
myself to criticise or comment on the long extract I now make 
from the ‘ Discussion.’ It is sufficient to say that I totally dissent 
from the spirit and tone of the entire passage as applied to my 
friend. 
“The mere wrongful supplanting of an old name by the new one of the 
obscure pretender is not a matter about which Science troubles itself at all. 
But the pretender of the other class which I have already mentioned, for 
whom the law of priority pushes wide the door, is a person whose influence 
is indeed to be dreaded, and the occupation by him of a conspicuous place 
among men of science is a misfortune, little short of a calamity. The 
person I refer to is the List-maker, or Catalogologist. 
“The usual way in which old or re-discovered names are brought to the 
notice of naturalists is by the publication of corrected lists of species, in 
which the ‘ prior’ names appear instead of the ones in use. These lists of 
names, publications of no intrinsic merit, and supplying absolutely no test 
of their author's worth, are, I say unhesitatingly, the publications which are 
in Entomology regarded as of most importance and are now most widely 
studied. The author of one of these publications is the person I mean by 
a list-maker. 
“These lists, and their unnatural importance, furnish matter for grave 
consideration for those who have at heart the interests of science. Now, 
lists of names must observe some certain order ; and the order of the names 
is also the order of the species. The list-maker, then, cannot publish his 
paltry work without at the same time trespassing on the great department 
of Classification. It is notorious that most important changes in classifica- 
tion are continually introduced by synonymic Lists, and these list-writers 
are actually pitch-forked into the position of founders of systems of 
arrangement! The one glaring instance of this in Entomology must be 
known to many present. A French author actually preferred, though 
himself a prolific book-writer, to give to the world his ideas on classification 
through the medium of a Synonymic List, intended for labelling collections, 
and published in London. That list, bought for labelling by a thousand 
collectors, spread far and wide the new order of arrangement of the Lepi- 
doptera, and Mr. Doubleday, its author, as if by magic found himself the 
founder of a system, in defence of which neither he nor anyone else ever 
